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Comment by tetraca | Hacker News Reader

Upload your fake text and images anywhere. Upload it everywhere. Upload it as yourself. Upload it on behest of your willing friends. Corrupt your face in dozens of ways, then tag each as yourself. When everything is garbage, shadow profiles will mean nothing, social credit scores will mean nothing, analytics will mean nothing. Centralization can be turned on its head - the watering hole will be revealed to be the dangerous cesspit it is. Create art until what can be monetized has no value. Create news that never happened, scoops that are only a distant fiction, until nothing on the internet can even be meaningfully reported on. The corrosive powers of mass memetics for the first time can be rendered entirely impotent.

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While I honestly do want to support this approach because unlike the alternative it might (just "might", though) work, I regretfully must also admit that the huge problem with this is collateral damage. There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue with fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point (when the understanding that existing trust system is fatally broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this situation worse.

What's extremely frustrating is that the only alternative I've ever seen proposed are forms of a never-ending moderation arms race, some variant of a "war on fakes". Which is even scarier in the long run, because while it mitigates the damages here and now (good), it would never solve the underlying problem, and only further cement some parts of it (enforced trust invites potential abuse).

And as usual, humanity is currently stuck between two incredibly shitty options (traditionally going through a path of least resistance, no matter what could be at the end of it - because that's how large systems work), hopefully still searching for a magical third silver bullet.

> There are millions of humans out there that are either highly susceptible to or are already caught into believing all sorts of nonsense, getting scammed in all forms, costing them money, time, well-being and even lives. The issue with fake flood is that until the saturation/breaking point (when the understanding that existing trust system is fatally broken becomes truly mainstream) it's going to make this situation worse.

The people who are willing to engage in charlatanism and mass manipulation are already enabled by this tooling and will use AI as a force multiplier whether we use it to jam the signal or not, and the results will be far, far worse for victims because these people will actually have directed, dangerous goals and agendas to push them toward rather than having them flail in a contradictory trash pile.

It’s only a problem that large numbers are easily duped no matter how much education we give them when it’s also coupled with no-questions-asked universal suffrage.

It depends in part on the quality of what is passed off as education. After twelve years of US public education in the 1970’s and 80’s, not once did critical thinking tools, types and sources of bias, and default-mode skepticism come up. I’d rather work on improving that, rather than making it even harder for citizens to vote.

And the #1 way to improve educational outcomes is to figure out how to attract better candidates to be elementary teachers, NOT curriculum micromanagement (whether from elected school boards or directly from parents)

I agree with your point, but also think this trajectory is kind of inevitable in a way. As we can already see, a LOT of people are living deep in a world of BS news stories and made up facts, to the point where they're basically in a different reality.

Ideally, we'd find a way to go backwards from where we are now, maybe future generations will grow up with this flood of false info and learn to navigate it, but I think we reached a point where tech is developing so fast, and the world is changing so fast, that there were always be a large number of people who can't "keep up".

Given that, this may be one of the few scenarios where I'm in favor of a kind of "accelerationism" - increase the problem to a breaking point as soon as possible so that we can deal with the fallout and recover from it now, rather than dealing with this horrible state of things for decades and decades as it slowly gets worse and worse, until we eventually reach a breaking point anyway and likely have an even worse fallout to recover from.

I appreciate your comment. Thinking of it - you are probably right. It is a matter of time, as long as we don't accidentally take a wrong turn toward some dystopia. Won't happen in my lifetime, but future generations raised observing this state of discord would naturally learn how to deal with it. And us old farts with our susceptibility for delusion (because we, en masse, have only encountered it past our youth, when learning and adapting is harder) will be history.

If it leads to total chaos (which I think it's going to) I could easily see governments trying to enact the following:

- A public blockchain or database for ID purposes, with every ID traceable back to a real human. Legislation created that mandates all websites implementing user profiles for any social purpose to require an official ID on signup and every user must be identifiable on the platform by their real name.

- Access to AI only under strict restrictions. Official apps you're allowed to use with the government banning all others. Big Tech will happily comply with the censoring because they are the designated official AI app providers.

- Photorealistic AI and Video banned entirely because the potential to incite violence through fake videos is too high. Imagine Pizzagate or Jan 6th but someone made a Blair Witch style video showing Biden and Pelosi killing a baby as members of a secret cult. Or someone made a video of one of their enemies committing animal abuse and sending it to everyone in the town.

- Exams will make up the entirety of your grade in most educational environments apart from those where AI cannot be used for creating the coursework.

- Anyone caught using non-official AI or abusing AI will be subject to harsh prison time akin to hacking state secrets.

Of course, the government and its agencies will have access to all of this technology for their own purposes so they will be able to create whatever they want to control you, your thoughts and society's perception to be whatever they want it to be. As this isn't really preferable to the complete chaos it's trying to control, more and more people will try to disconnect from the internet as much as possible. The IRL economy will grow and there will be a resurgence in analogue forms of media for counter culture types. There may even be a resurgence of interest in blue collar trade jobs if white collar jobs are decimated and wages plummet.

We are on the precipice of 1984.

This reminds me of the great novel Fiasco by Stanislaw Łem [1].

The civilization described in the novel fills the entire radio spectrum with noise, to make efficient communication impossible (and possibly to also allow highly sophisticated noise-like encrypted communication be undetectable).

Their society is pretty dystopian though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

Also the book _The Cyberiad_ by Lem is now more relevant than ever. It is a set of short stories, mostly about messing with generative AI, AI assistants, etc.

We didn't need the help of AI to do this to poetry already. It turns out that access to a text editor was more than sufficient.

I was going to say this is a great idea but totally unfeasible due to the amount of cooperation required, enough people simply won't do it, but parts of it are kind of happening by default. e.g. with BS news stories and whatnot. Also I suppose a lot of it could be automated - fighting fire with fire in a way. I'm sure that would lead to a cat-and-mouse game of creating code for detecting and ignoring intentionally obfuscating content, then the other side coding their way around those detection systems, and then back and forth like that forever, similar to the pattern of: finding exploit -> patching exploit -> finding new exploit -> patching new exploit -> etc.

I'd be careful. By doing this you can use the date these AIs became readily available as a tool for bisecting between "legitimate profiles" before the year X and "potentially fake" profiles from after the year X, which can then be used to very effectively train an AI to tell the difference...

Sure, it also mean limiting the dataset of our children (i.e. the bane of ML), it means bit-rot for existing datasets.

> Create art until what can be monetized has no value.

A1.

Now you see why tribes form by evolution just as mutation does.

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